Traditional approaches to network content management are widely used today by a variety of entities such as pay television providers, corporate networks, and members only Internet websites. These traditional approaches usually rely on maintaining groups of users who are eligible to receive certain content. Many different kinds of relationships and security schemes are used to associate users and content. For instance, a corporate network may include several different groups of users who are eligible to access different groups of content based on job description and need to know. A vice president of corporation finance may belong to one group of users that has access to financial files, and an engineer may belong to another group of users that has access to a completely separate set of purely technical files. All of the corporate users may belong to yet another group of users that has access to general corporate information like a community bulletin board, a schedule of company social events, etc. Depending on who a user is, the user may or may not have authority to read, write, execute, and/or delete content stored in a file structure on the network.
In a pay television network, certain viewers will have purchased only the basic television channels and other users will have purchased one or more premium channels or packages of channels, such as sports packages for particular professional teams. Channels that a viewer has not paid for are generally scrambled. With potentially hundreds of thousand or even millions of viewers, and potentially hundreds of different channel packages, the associations and security controls among viewers and content are likely to be very complex.
As the number of users on a network increases, and as the volume of content distributed over the network increases, managing the distribution of content becomes more difficult. This is particularly true as networks become more interactive and more dynamic. The Internet provides a good example of a difficult network to manage. The size of the Internet and the dynamic nature of the Internet make content management particularly challenging.
The number of people and organizations connected to the Internet continues to increase virtually every day. At the same time, the volume of information available on the Internet continues to increase. People can add new content, delete content, decide to access different content, search for new content, etc., on the spur of the moment. A content provider never knows what to expect. If a content provider attracts too much attention, the provider can become overwhelmed with traffic, essentially shutting down the provider. On the other hand, a content provider can easily become lost in the vast virtual expense of the Internet and receive very little traffic if any at all.
As the Internet and broadcast services merge, the content management challenges will continue to increase. For instance, for an existing pay television network, the number of users and volume of content is likely to be large, but the content and user groups are comparatively static. That is, the pay television provider can usually predict what television channels it is going to provide, and the typical user probably will not change his or her package of channels very often. Changes to content and user groups can be managed over the course of days or weeks.
In an Internet environment, however, the dynamic nature of user groups and content could drastically change. An Internet-based pay television service could be entirely pay-per-view, resulting in huge fluctuations in the number of users. For instance, the release of a particularly popular movie could attract too many viewers and shut down the content server. Multicasting can alleviate some of the difficulties with network content that is in high demand by transmitting a data stream that viewers can simply pick up in the network, analogous to a broadcast television signal from an antenna. Providing security for a multicast, however, provides additional changes. A large number of viewers may want to access the content, and each viewer will generally need to obtain a decryption key from the content provider in order to make use of the data stream. A large number of requests for decryption keys can overwhelm a server just like a large number of requests for any other kind of data.